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What this will do is read the entire partition one megabyte at a time and write it to /dev/null, which essentially means that it does nothing. It will not destroy data, though if you got some characters mixed up, it might. If you're in doubt about a command, always read the manpages before doing anything else.
Now, what brought this up? There are utilities that do these things more directly. If you're concerned about the consistency of your filesystem, `man fsck`; if you're worried about the health of the drive, read up on SMART data and smartctl (though this only does so good a job of predicting failures).
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